By Any Other Name by Simon Morley

Author:Simon Morley [Morley, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861540549
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

In France, this rise is exceedingly popular, and in the summer and autumn months, hundreds of plants are sold in the flower markets of Paris, principally on little stems or ‘mi tiges’. They are brought to market in pots, with their heads partially enveloped in coloured paper in such an elegant and effective manner, that it is scarcely possible to avoid being tempted to give two or three francs for such a pretty object.17

ELEVEN

‘Pedigree Hybrids of the Tea Rose’

Modern Roses

It is the summer of 1867 in the city of Lyon, France, and the breeder Jean-Baptiste André Guillot, known as Guillot fils, has just presented the world with a new variety of rose, the glorious culmination of the collective efforts of European botanists and breeders over the previous fifty years to marry the best of the East with the best of the West. Somewhat immodestly, Guillot fils proudly named the new rose ‘La France’. It is pale silvery pink in colour, has globular double blooms, and grows to around 4–5 feet tall in a tight shrub-like structure. For us, unlike Guillot fils’ contemporaries, looking at a specimen of ‘La France’ will seem a familiar and not especially extraordinary experience because ‘La France’ possesses most of the characteristics we routinely associate with the typical garden roses of today. But at the time it was a sensation; it was in the vanguard of the modern rose revolution which would soon give the world the Hybrid Tea family – the modern rose.

Guillot fils had conscientiously built on the success of a family of recent rose mutations called Hybrid Perpetuals. These were crosses with Portland, Chinas and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about 6 feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose.

But Guillot fils did not so much breed ‘La France’ as ensure favourable ambient conditions so he could ‘discover’ it. He himself described coming across the new variety in one of his beds of chance seedlings from Tea Roses, and admitted that he didn’t know for sure who the parents were.1 Such vagueness wasn’t at all unusual at the time, however. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Western botanists and horticulturalists overcame the two obstacles that had stood in the way of actively cross-breeding plants and animals: religion and ignorance. Until the Enlightenment philosophers challenged the pervasive belief that seeking to deliberately change nature was considered playing at God and therefore a sin, those who attempted it were understood to risk divine retribution, meted out via God’s representatives on earth.

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